BlogNotes

Office Timetable

2007-04-12T17:33:00.000+02:00

Italians seek changes on gay rights, abortion

2007-03-14T13:46:00.000+01:00

ITALY entered a moral minefield yesterday, igniting a debate on abortion law as 50,000 protesters marched on Rome to demand gay rights.

Waving rainbow-coloured banners with slogans such as ``Better Gay than Opus Dei'' and ``Homosexuality is not an offence: intolerance is'', the demonstrators called on parliament to pass legislation granting legal recognition to de facto and same-sex couples.

As Italy grapples with a church-versus-state debate over ``family values'', politicians, doctors and the Vatican are pushing for a review of Italy's 1978 abortion laws.

The abortion row blew up yesterday after the weekend death of a six-day-old baby boy who survived an abortion at a Florence hospital.

The baby's mother terminated her 22-week pregnancy based on ultrasound scans that falsely indicated severe birth defects.

The child was born perfectly healthy, but weighed just 500 grams and died of a brain haemorrhage and heart failure after six days in
intensive care.

Italy's Health Minister, Livia Tureo, yesterday defended Italy's abortion law, which grants women abortions on demand up to 90 days of pregnancy, and permits abortions until 24 weeks of pregnancy in cases where the mother's physical or psychological health is at
risk.

The 29-year-old law also requires doctors to do all they can to save the life of a fetus that survives an abortion.

Ms Tureo said MPs could not have predicted in 1978 the technological advances that now save the lives of babies born at 23 weeks (a full-term baby is born between 38 and 40 weeks).

``Neonatal doctors are faced with enormous difficulties, such as how to treat babies who are born prematurely, and where to set the limits for survival,'' Ms Tureo said.

The Corriere della Sera newspaper revealed yesterday that a Milanese hospital had banned abortions beyond 22 weeks -- in breach of the Italian law.

The health director of the Mangiagalli hospital, Basilio Tiso, said he had to balance the rights of women with the concerns of Catholic doctors.

``I had doctors knocking on my door continually, torn between their professional obligation to save the life of a fetus and the terrible knowledge they would be condemning most of them to a life of suffering,'' he said, noting that babies born before 23 weeks of pregnancy suffered grave handicaps.

``As science advances, the regulations have to keep up.''

A Rome hospital yesterday launched an inquiry into the director of its abortion clinic, who had been forcing patients to sign forms authorising doctors to let surviving fetuses die.

The director of the San Camillo hospital's maternity division, Claudio Donadio, denounced his colleague's actions as ``infanticide''.

The Vatican compared the abortion of malformed fetuses toNazi ``race-purification''
policies.

Italy records about 138,123 abortions a year, of which 2449 are classified as late-term abortions performed to safeguard the mother's health. The number of abortions in Italy has dropped 44per cent since 1982, and fell 6per cent from 2004 to 2005.

The political rows over abortion and homosexuality are opening new fracture lines in Italy's fragile centre-left coalition Government.

A proposed law -- bitterly opposed by the Pope -- would grant limited inheritance rights to unmarried couples, as well as ``next of kin'' status if one partner is admitted to hospital.

De facto couples may also apply for property rights and maintenance if they split after three years' cohabitation.

Prime Minister Romano Prodi has agreed to give his MPs -- who range from Communists to Catholics -- a conscience vote on legislation granting rights to de facto couples. Mr Prodi is a devoted Catholic but staunch supporter of de facto rights.

One of Mr Prodi's allies, Justice Minister Clemente Mastella of the Catholic EDEUR party, said he was not sure if he could continue to prop up a government that supported gay rights. The party's support is vital to the Prodi Government, which collapsed briefly last month when it lost a Senate vote to fund its peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan.

The Senate meets on March 27 to vote once more on the Afghanistan mission.

Source: Australian, The, MAR 12, 2007

3 Nurses go to Heaven

2007-02-27T23:02:00.000+01:00

Three nurses died and went to Heaven, where they were met at the Pearly Gates by St. Peter.

To the first, he asked, "So, what did you used to do back on Earth? Why do you think you should be allowed to come into Heaven?"

"I was a nurse at an inner city hospital," she replied. "I worked to bring healing and peace to many sufferers, especially poor, helpless children.

"Very noble," said St. Peter. "You may enter."
And in through the Gates she went.

To the next, he asked the same question, "So, what did you used to do?"

"I was a nurse at a missionary hospital in the Amazon basin," she replied. "For many years, I worked with a skeleton crew of doctors and nurses who tried to reach out to as many people across numerous tribes, with a hand of healing and peace, and with the message about God`s love."

"How touching," said St. Peter. "You, too, may enter."
And in she went.

He then came to the last nurse, to whom he asked, "So, what did you used to do back on Earth?"

After some hesitation, she explained, "I was just a nurse at an HMO."

St. Peter pondered this for a moment, and then said, "Ok, you may enter, too."
"Whew!" said the nurse. "For a moment there, I thought you weren`t going to let me in."
"Oh, you can come in," said St. Peter, "but you can only stay for three days."

E.U. Report Faults 16 Nations in Probe Of Secret CIA Flights

2007-02-14T22:37:00.000+01:00

PARIS, Feb. 14 -- The European Parliament on Wednesday approved a report admonishing 15 European countries and Turkey for helping the CIA transport terrorism suspects held in secret or for failing to cooperate in the parliament's investigation of the practice.

The legislative body for the European Union's 27 countries said many member states have been "turning a blind eye" to the CIA-operated flights carrying prisoners who were subjected to "incommunicado detention and torture" during interrogations, violating E.U. human rights standards.

"We have opened up a closed door and there is even more behind this," said parliament member Giovanni Claudio Fava, an Italian Socialist who drafted the report. It was approved by a 382 to 256 vote, with 74 abstentions.

The parliament criticized the CIA renditions -- an extralegal tactic by which alleged terrorists have been abducted and interrogated at secret sites overseas -- "as an illegal instrument used by the USA in the fight against terrorism" and condemned the "acceptance and concealing of the practices by the secret services and governmental authorities of certain European countries."

The parliament deleted some of the toughest sections of the report, however, including recommendations for sanctions against some countries for human rights violations. It softened criticisms of some governments, including those of Britain , Germany and Spain, after intense lobbying from those states.

The vote came after a divisive debate among members.

Parliament member Jas Gawronski of Italy criticized the final report as "a blanket condemnation of the secret services" and said it was "predicated on the assumption that there is one chief guilty party and that is the USA."

President Bush acknowledged last September that the CIA used secret prisons to interrogate some terrorism suspects overseas. He did not say where the prisons were located.

A parliamentary committee spent a year investigating the allegations and interviewed more than 200 witnesses, including E.U., NATO and U.S. State Department officials as well as individuals who alleged they had been kidnapped by CIA agents in Europe and held in secret U.S. prisons.

The report criticized the E.U. foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, for "omissions" in his testimony before the parliamentary panel.

The report, which repeated basic findings made in a draft released last year, admonished 11 countries for having a role in CIA flights: Germany, Sweden, Spain, Ireland, Greece, Cyprus, Denmark, Turkey, Macedonia, Bosnia and Romania. The report also cited Britain, Austria, Italy, Poland and Portugal as uncooperative in the probe.

The report said its investigators had received no information to "contradict any of the allegations" that the CIA ran a secret prison in Romania and said the parliament could not "acknowledge or deny" that any of the secret facilities had been set up in Poland. Those two countries have denied hosting CIA prisons.

Separately, the Swiss government on Wednesday authorized a criminal investigation into a February 2003 CIA flight that reportedly carried Egyptian cleric Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, from Italy, where he was allegedly kidnapped, to Ramstein Air Base in Germany, crossing Swiss airspace. Nasr was then taken to Cairo.

Source: Washington Post, The, Feb 15, 2007

How to Pull It Off

2006-12-17T02:17:00.000+01:00

87 tips for making your next family trip easy, fun, and comfortable

CAMPING WITH KIDS is all about highs and lows. One minute they're ecstatic because they scrambled up a boulder. Then, in a flash they're sobbing because they dropped a lollipop in the dirt. To parents, planning a family backpacking trip can be daunting. After all, it can take a day to pack for a 2-day outing. But getting into the backcountry--even a few miles off the beaten path--can lead to a whole different kind of adventure. In short: It's hard work that's worth the effort.

Plus, we can make it easier. Here's our straight-talking, trail-tested advice for taking children of all ages into the wilderness.

6 months to 2 years
As soon as your baby can hold her head up and ride in a backpack (as opposed to a front pack), you're ready. Parents can be edgy about hiking with little ones, but babies are ideal companions--they're lighter than many tents and never complain about blisters and burnt rice.

Strategy Babies are portable at this stage, so take advantage of the chance to actually hike a few miles--you'll miss this when toddlerhood comes around. Little ones love to chill out on your back and watch the scenery roll by. One key: Don't skip naptime. Most kids will be lulled to sleep by the rhythm of walking, but if yours fights it, be sure to schedule tent time.

Single biggest challenge In a word, diapers.

Sleeping arrangements First-time parents are often terrified of suffocating their baby, but old hands know that infants don't need their own bag. If your child is not a thrasher, simply snuggle the little nipper into your bag and spoon all night. Or zip together two compatible bags and let baby snooze between you and your spouse. If you just can't handle a co-sleeping scenario, zip your kid into a puffy down jacket. Just be sure she wears a hat and has her own pad. (A baby-sized rectangle of open-cell foam does the trick, and it's light in your pack.)

Become one with dirt Crawlers will get very dirty in camp. Most parents find it nerve-racking to watch an 18-month-old slither in the dust, hands and face turning browner by the minute. But you know what? Dirt won't kill them. Resist the urge to scrub them clean every 5 minutes, and focus on real safety issues. Visually scour the campsite, and remove or blockade anything low and dangerous-holes, fire-ant hills, thorny plants, poison ivy, scat piles. Alternate 30-minute baby-watch shifts, so no one has to blurt out: "But I thought YOU were watching her!"

Pack this Lots of gallon-size zipper-locks to pack out stinky diapers, and hand-sanitizing gel for post-change disinfecting. And since you'll be hauling precious, heavy cargo, hike in boots with good ankle support, and trekking poles for stability. Also, for the precious cargo, down or fleece booties are critical. A baby in a kid carrier can lose some foot circulation, especially on longer, cooler hikes.

Essential gear Babies in backpacks need to be comfortable and secure. Kelty's Adventure kid carrier has a padded harness system to hold an infant in place, plus a cushy setup for mum and dad. It stands up on its own, so it can double as a high chair. Other bonuses: a sun/rain shade, 1,500 cubic inches of additional cargo space, a removable kid pack, and handy waist and shoulder strap pockets. $240; 8 lbs. 4 oz.; kelty.com. Reader service #101

3 to 6 years
These are the most challenging years. Kids this age are exploding with curiosity, but they're too big to carry and too young to walk more than 20 paces without stopping to examine ovary caterpillar. They tire easily, melt down often, and lack the sense to back away from crumbly cliffs.

Strategy Accept this fact right now: Big miles and peakbagging are out of the question. You will only hike as far and fast as the youngest toddler in your group. Adjust your expectations, then try to devise games to encourage him or her to move leisurely down the trail. "I Spy with my little eye…a moss covered tree up ahead."

Single biggest challenge Preventing meltdowns. Kids this age love adventures, but they also crave the comfort of their normal routine. Keep them engaged and excited about the newness of their surroundings. Make a big deal when you discover animal tracks, scat, frogs, wildflowers, or anything else of interest. Stop and ask your child questions: "What kind of animal do you think made that?" Another big hit: the treasure hunt. Give each kid a zipper-lock baggie and list of items to find: a heart-shaped rock, a red leaf, a pencil-sized stick, a pinecone, a feather. Award prizes (candy) for the best finds.

Unexpected challenge Getting your child to poop in the woods. Many kids this age will hold it as long as they can, rather than do their business without the cool, clean comfort of the porcelain throne. Obviously, this is not a good or healthy option. While it's not unusual for a child to go the first day of a trip without a BM, after that, you should encourage it. Show them how to squat low (it helps move things along), and take the opportunity to teach Leave No Trace ethics, like burying waste and packing out toilet paper.

The Superman complex Beware: Most kids this age think they're invincible. Unless something roars loudly and has huge, pointy fangs, they don't consider it dangerous. So stay especially close at steep overlooks, while bouldering, or when crossing streams on slippery deadfall.

Pack this Headlamps for every child. If you don't, they'll beg for yours. Pick a lightweight LED lamp (a set of batteries will last forever if it's left on) with an easy push-button switch and a single, around-the-head strap, such as the Black Diamond Ion LED ($20; 1 oz.; bdel.com; Reader service #125). Also, preschoolers love to carry their own pack--if it's comfortable and has a pocket for their favorite toy. Hydrapack's Bambino is all this and more: It holds a 50-ounce hydration system, which encourages kids to slurp away. $30; 7 oz.; hydrapak.com. Reader service #102

7 to 11 years
Once your kids hit this age range, you're out of the woods, figuratively speaking, They can (pretty much) keep up with you on the trail, help with chores, and entertain themselves for hours on end, skipping rocks or picking blueberries.

Strategy Think action! Pick a fun destination--a lake, waterfall, or a big, slabby rock formation--no more than 2 to 4 miles from your basecamp. Plan to reach it before lunch and spend a couple of hours exploring, relaxing, eating, climbing, or swimming.

Single biggest challenge Keeping them motivated and positive. At this age, kids actually enjoy doing chores (camp chores, that is). By helping with tasks like gathering firewood, filtering water, setting up the tent or laying out the sleeping gear, preteens can earn a sense of involvement, ownership, and accomplishment.

Pack this Tent games: a deck of cards for playing Crazy Eights and Hearts, or the perennial BACKPACKER favorite, Pass the Pigs ($10 on amazon.com).

Gear to get them stoked Trekking poles are always a huge hit with this age group. (Got boys? Quickly establish a no-swordfighting rule.) Leki's Pathfinder Jr. two-section aluminum poles adjust from 80 to 110 cm and have kid-sized grips with adjustable straps. 14 oz.; $40; leki.com. Reader service #104

Time for some real boots Up until this age, kids can safely hike in sneakers. (Though there are some excellent options if you want to invest earlier.) As your offspring hit the preteen years and start to carry some weight, though, their feet need protection and support. Look for boots that are neither too stiff (uncomfortable) or too soft (unsupportive); we like Garmont's Nagevi Junior ($55; garmontusa.com; Reader service #126). Good hiking boots should feel different, than sneakers--a bit more rigid underfoot, and often higher in the ankle. Make sure your kid logs plenty of break-in time before the trip; you don't want to deal with pinched toes 5 miles from the car.

12 years and older
Teens are headstrong and fiercely independent. This is the perfect time to teach key outdoor skills such as firestarting, cooking, and navigation.

Strategy Grant them space and ample responsibility. Give them a map, and let them hike ahead with a mandate to wait at the next trail junction. Cut them loose from the family tent and let them pack their own, easy-to-erect 2-person shelter. Even more so than the 7-to-11 age group, teens thrive when they're involved in camp chores. Other gratifying lessons: lighting the stove and making dinner; starting a fire with flint and tinder; hanging a food bag. Or let them study the map and plan tomorrow's hike. Teens can also be very helpful corralling younger ones and keeping them out of trouble.

Single biggest challenge Tearing your teens away from competing interests, like friends, cell phones, and MySpace. Easy solution: let them invite a friend.

Pack this Plenty of food. Teens--expecially boys--have voracious appetites. Be sure to pack double the amount of snack food they eat at home. Stuff their pockets with granola bars and bags of trail mix, so you don't have to stop to dole it out every 10 minutes.

Gear to get them stoked Boys (and plenty of girls) love to pack their own pocket knife for whittling and carving (a related accessory: extra bandages). Give your kid a budget ($40 will land a moderately tricked-out tool) and let him shop for his own Swiss Army knife at wengerna.com or swissarmy.com. Or get a new journal and an inexpensive or disposable digital camera. Artistically inclined kids will love a packable paint set like the Winsor & Newton Cotman Field Box ($40 at cheapjoes.com).

Hand-me-down time For the most part, your kids are now ready for grown-up gear. That means you've got many more affordable options in new gear, and can finally pass along your heirloom long johns and fleece jackets.

By the Numbers
How much can your child handle?

Legend for Chart:

A - Age
B - Pack weight(*)
C - Mileage
D - Beta

A B C D

3-4 years nada 1 mile The ultimate or so exercise in patience

5-6 years 5 lbs. 2-4 miles Expect lots of rest stops

7-11 years 10-20% of 5-7 miles Keep the body weight candy handy

12 years 20-25% of Up to They can physically and older body weight 7 miles hike more miles, but keep it mellow. You want them to have fun, right?

(*) These numbers can vary greatly, depending on terrain and the child's stamina and energy level.

First Aid
Augment your regular backpacking kit with these must-haves for kids:

• children's or infants' acetaminophen (Tylenol) and/or ibuprofen (Advil, Motrin). Ask your pediatrician for sample packs.*

• liquid antihistamine*

• epinephrine pen (if your child has allergies)

• lots of adhesive bandages (especially Batman/Dora the Explorer/insert favorite character here)

• calamine lotion and an after-bug-bite treatment

• tweezers to remove splinters, ticks, or cactus needles

*know age/weight-appropriate dosages before you go

Pack plenty of antibacterial baby wipes-the easiest way to wash hands before a meal or after playing with bugs.

The Big Top Invest in a family-size tent
Bunkroom, portable playroom, dressing room, bug and rain refuge. It's impossible to overemphasize the beauty of a big, comfortable, weatherworthy tent. A good bet: the Big Agnes Big House 4. It's roomy enough for two adults plus three little kids (or two big ones), yet light enough to haul into the backcountry (10 lbs. 8 oz) when split between two adults. Plenty of mesh keeps things cool, two doors ensure ample access, and a built-in welcome mat reminds kids to leave muddy boots at the door. The three-pole configuration is easy to set up and results in a palatial 5 3/4 feet of headroom. $299; bigagnes.com. Reader service #103

Check out our upcoming Gear Guide (March) for a whole section of reviews on kids' gear and clothing.

Secrets to success, for all ages
Invite another family Don't get all sappy with the kids about precious quality family time. Save that for Disney World. Once your kids hit about age 5, their enthusiasm for any given activity is greatly enhanced by the presence of friends. Plus, with another set of parents around, you can take shifts, maybe even allowing time for a kidless getaway hike.

Start small Make your first few trips overnights or weekenders. Choose your destination wisely, too. Don't be overly ambitious when it comes to mileage or altitude. Look for places where you can hike in a mile or two to a scenic basecamp that's within reach of a swimming hole, boulder field, gravelly river, or some other attraction. (Keep in mind that you'll most likely be making at least a couple of trips to shuttle in gear.)

Bribe early and often If ever there is a time to ply your kids with sugary treats, it's on a hiking trip. When you sense a whinefest coming on, stop for a break, bust out the Skittles, and a major attitude adjustment is guaranteed.

Check the weather A rainy afternoon holed up in a tent can be great fun, but if the forecast calls for a stormy cold front all weekend, scrap your plans until good weather returns,

Battle the bugs If mosquitoes or blackflies inhabit your chosen destination, having the right gear becomes paramount. Each kid should have a baseball cap and mosquito headnet, plus loose-fitting long-sleeve shirts and pants. Bring plenty of bug spray--look for the kid formulas with less deer-and keep it off their faces and hands.

Don't skimp on gear Fun cannot happen without comfort. Once kids hit 4 or 5, they can't share your sleeping bag any longer. Excellent kids' bags, like Lafuma's GR Junior 35°F synthetic mummy, can be had for as little as $30 on amazon.com. Foam pads cost less than $10.

Ditto for clothing Invest in a few key items: quick-dry pants or shorts, a warm jacket, good raingear. (Tip: No budget for synthetic long johns? Buy a pair of perfectly functional polyester pajamas at Target, Wal-Mart, or K-Mart for $10 to $15.)

Keep a group journal For longer trips, this is a great way to involve the whole family in a common project. Each day, assign a different journal keeper to record whatever he or she deems important--the weather, wildlife sightings, observations, conversations. Younger kids can draw pictures and gather leaves or flowers to press.

Fun Food Meal-by-meal tips to please the whole family
At home, mealtime rules are carved in stone: Finish your broccoli, drink your milk, easy on the snacks. In the woods, however, you have a rare chance to loosen up, Here's how to use food as a great motivator for all ages.

Breakfast Bring an Outback Oven and cook up some gooey cinnamon rolls or banana bread. Or jazz up instant-oatmeal packets with yogurt-covered raisins or scavenged blueberries.

Lunch Keep it simple with PB&J on bagels or pita, or cheese-and-salami sandwiches. Add water to dehydrated hummus mix and dip tortilla wedges. Slice up an apple or orange.

Dinner Is there a kid alive who doesn't go nuts for a bowl of steamy mac 'n' cheese? Make perennial kid favorites--cheese quesadillas or pepperoni pizza--in your Outback Oven. Or try our Pizza-in-a-Bowl recipe (top right).

Dessert Make a batch of chocolate-chip cookies in the Outback Oven--the-slice-and-bake logs from the dairy aisle work great. And remember: It's not a camping trip without s'mores (see ideas at right).

Snacks Snacks (read: bribes) can make or break your trip. Some tried-and-true favorites:

• fruit snacks or leathers

• gorp with a high candy-to-fruit-and-nut ratio

• fan pops, push-up pops, ring pops, bubblegum tape, or anything novel

• cheese sticks

Beverages Some kids get bored with water, so spike their H20 with a sweet drink mix. Bring cocoa packets (bonus points for mini-marshmallows) to serve at breakfast and dinner.

Pizza-in-a-Bowl
All four food groups crammed into one easy-to-fix meal

2 cups whole-wheat couscous
½ teaspoon dried oregano
½ teaspoon dried basil
4 oz. mozzarella cheese
4 oz. pepperoni
1 small red bell pepper (it will
stay fresh for at least 3 days)

At home Pack couscous and herbs in a zipper-lock bag.

In camp Boil 4 cups water. Meanwhile, finely dice the cheese, pepperoni, and bell pepper. Once the water boils, remove it from the stove and stir in the couscous-herb mix. Cover and let stand about 7 minutes. Fluff with a fork and stir in the remaining ingredients.

S'more Ideas for Dessert
A few of our favorite insanely sweet creations

» Place a toasted marshmallow between two chocolate-chip cookies.

» Substitute a peanut-butter cup for the chocolate bar.

» Substitute vanilla wafers for graham crackers.

» Smush a toasted marshmallow between two graham crackers until the white stuff oozes out the sides. Roll it like a wheel through a plate of M&M's.

Timeless advice for grown-up newbies
What if good old Uncle Norman decides to join the family camping trip? Follow these, tips to ensure that his camping experience is comfortable and stress-free.

Go luxe A cushy sleeping pad, plump pillow, and camp chair are must-haves for virgin campers.

Jettison the jeans Check his personal gear--replacing his cotton tees and white sports socks--and make sure his boots are properly broken in.

Go gourmet Other meals can be simple, but make the adults' supper memorable. Try a pesto-and-sun-dried tomato pizza, penne à la vodka, and something chocolatey for dessert.

Spread Cheer If he's the type who likes a nip or two, bring along a flask of his favorite single malt or a bottle of Rioja.

Easy does it Even if he's a tough guy, make sure his pack is light and the trail is mellow.

Build pre-trip excitement Find scenic, enticing images online or in this magazine to get him salivating. If he's an avid angler, give him a topo with good fishing holes highlighted; if he's a wildflower or wildlife nut, buy him a location-specific field guide.

Gear editor Kristin Hostetter employs sons Charlie, 6, and Joey, 4, as testers because they work cheap, are photogenic, and offer such helpful feedback as "awesome!" or "I hate that!"

Backpacker

Fair Play

2006-12-17T02:12:00.000+01:00

Wall Street money, edgy art, and party-hopping scenesters have turned Art Basel Miami Beach into a culture-driven Davos.

On a strip of South Beach behind the Delano Hotel, investment bank UBS plans to erect an air-conditioned tent to welcome 1,500 people to Art Basel Miami Beach on Dec. 5. A spillover pool and 12 ficus trees, exactly what you might expect at a UBS event, lie between the tent and the hotel. Except each tree seems to have been trimmed to, well, resemble a woman's breast--a 12-foot-wide woman's breast.

It's the perfect setting for the orgy of conspicuous consumption that is ABMB, now the largest contemporary art fair in the world. But ABMB isn't just a place where colored mud, skillfully applied to canvas just weeks prior, sells for nearly $100,000; it's much more. It's a corporate marketing opportunity, tourism magnet, cultural pacesetters' retreat, and celebrity hangout all rolled into one.

Where else could you see A-Rod mingling with septuagenarian artist John Baldessari, tastemaking collectors such as South Beach boutique-hotel developers Don and Mera Rubell, dropping tens of thousands of dollars on artists no one has heard of from countries few had considered (last year's Rubell special: Poland), and, in the middle of it all, people whispering at parties about whether that skin color comes from "tan in a can" or UVB lights?

At ABMB, art world figures are elevated to tabloid fodder. "Dealer Mary Boone was spotted on the terrace of the ultra-swanky Delano Hotel, dressed to kill in a daffodil-yellow dress and clutching a shiny red cellphone that matched her bright-red heels," Artinfo.com reported last year.

"The combination of art and beach was new," says ABMB director Sam Keller, trying to explain the fair's success. "Who wouldn't want to come here from up north in winter?"

The fair was born in the late 1990s when Miami collectors approached privately held MCH Swiss Exhibitions Ltd. about coming to their town. Since 1970, Swiss Exhibitions had run Art Basel, one of the world's two grandest fairs (the other is TEFAF Maastricht). After dignitaries from both camps partied together at a Miami Beach bar called Big Fish, and the Miami Beach contingent visited Basel to make a pitch, Swiss Exhibitions agreed to launch a second fair.

"We told Sam we'd buy all-in," says collector and Florida venture capitalist Dennis Scholl. "We said, 'We'll do whatever it takes to get you here.' And Sam said, 'Okay, we'll do it. But all of you collectors will have to open up your homes.' We said, 'Whaaaa?!' But we did it."

That was Keller's masterstroke: Collectors like to show off what they own--and they want to know what their rivals have that they don't. When the fair started, Miami Beach was just enough out of the New York/Los Angeles mainstream of the contemporary art world that South Florida collections were a bit of a mystery. "I think that the first really important event in the recent history of Miami was the restoration of South Beach," says developer and collector Craig Robins. "It gave Miami an international identity. Art Basel has had a similar kind of impact."

During the fair, many of the best invites are meted out not just by Art Basel Miami Beach but by supersponsor UBS too. Over the course of six days UBS entertains about 4,000 clients and potential clients, making ABMB a UBS event nearly as popular as the America's Cup yacht race. After all, the nine-figure-net-worth crowd flocks to art fairs like groupies to hair bands.

"When you think about the C-suite and the hedge fund managers--the amount of money that these clients are putting into the art market is astounding," says Melanie Wright, UBS's head of U.S. sponsorship. "There's a lot of interest among our client-relationships folks to entertain their clients at events such as this." No wonder Deutsche Bank sponsors competing fairs in London and Cologne, and ING sponsors Art Brussels.

Most of the other ABMB sponsors are luxury brands. BMW will make 25 chauffeured 7-Series cars available to VIPs. NetJets also helps contribute to the $1.7 million that ABMB attracts in sponsorship fees--convenient, since only flights to a handful of events like the Super Bowl and the Masters are more requested by its clients.

As with almost everything at ABMB, the real action is at the high end: Morgans Hotel Group will charge $25,000 for five nights in the Delano's penthouse. Big galleries such as New York's Gagosian and Zurich's Hauser & Wirth will spend well into six figures to rent a booth, put up staff, and insure art. It's worth it: Several dealers say they do 30% of their annual business over the long weekend.

So while buzz and luxury drive the fair, is the art any good? Yes and no. There's enough high-quality work here that top museums find things to buy. A version of a striking Olafur Eliasson prism sculpture from the booth of Berlin gallery Neugerriemschneider ended up in the collection of the Smithsonian's Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden a few months later. But there's an abundance of kitschy paintings of fat folks available too.

Smart fairgoers know that not all of the best deals are at the "main fair." A dozen satellite fairs have sprung up during ABMB weekend, providing venues for a total of 600 galleries. Collectors of the newest art, like Leonard Nimoy and his wife, Susan Bay Nimoy, focus on the satellites.

By the end of the weekend ABMB will have turned the $9 million it costs to put on the fair into what economists and local officials estimate at $400 million to $500 million worth of art sales and related economic impact. With the fairs gone, Miami Beach will return to normal. The city's grit will no longer be obscured by BMW 7-Series glare, hotel vacancy rates will skyrocket, and tables at Joe's Stone Crab will once again be available.

At least until next year.

Beyond the Big Tent
The best deals are often outside the main fair at a growing number of "satellite" fairs. Here are four worth checking out.

NADA Art Fair The edgiest of the satellites, featuring art that might fall apart on the way home.

Aqua Art Miami Less N.Y.C. - or Euro-centric than the others, so a good place to discover new artists.

PULSE Tent-based fair for galleries too grown up for NADA but not hip enough for Aqua.

DiVA Miami Beach First-timer shows video and other media art on the sand in Lummus Park.

Little black book
What to see (and where to be seen) during the fair.

Cheapest Thrill
On Dec. 6 indie rocker Peaches will perform a free concert on the beach.

Sleeper Sleep
The Days Inn (yes, really) is located right next to ABMB's ultrahip "container" galleries.

Safest Sushi
South Beach is full of sushi tourist traps. If you want raw fish, don't do discount--head to Nobu.

Suite Splurge
Five days in the penthouse at the Delano will run you $25,000.

Best Open Bar
UBS invites 1,500 VIPs and spares no expense for its kickoff party on Dec. 5 in a beachfront tent at the Delano.

Toughest Invite
Dennis Hopper hosts 50 guests for the Art Loves Film Dinner at the Delano on Dec. 8.

Top Table
One of the hardest seats to score during fairs week is at the famous Joe's Stone Crab.

By Tyler Green, Fortune

How to really get along with the U.S.

2006-12-03T11:59:00.000+01:00

Allan Gotlieb reveals his strategy for getting Washington to listen

Nearly 20 years have passed since Allan Gotlieb left his post as Canada's ambassador to the United States of America, first under Pierre Trudeau and then Brian Mulroney. But his shadow still hovers over the embassy: he and his writer wife, Sondra, both native Winnipeggers, ran the mission to the U.S. in a way that no one has since matched. His successors still follow many of "Gotlieb's rules" of diplomacy that the Rhodes Scholar laid out over more than seven memorable years -- among them, "we are not simply two clone nations with one -- us -- occasionally suffering from aberrant policies." Gotlieb is now publishing his private journal, spanning the beginnings of the Free Trade Agreement, the softwood lumber dispute, acid rain and the first mentions of missile defence -- or, as he puts it, "One Damn Thing After Another." The Washington Diaries are very much like the man himself: alternately self-congratulatory and self-deprecating, policy-wonk-dry and bladder-busting funny, with insights that withstand the test of time. "Americans just do not see us as different from themselves," he writes. "When we do something different, Americans feel betrayed. They don't see us as foreigners but as perverse Americans."

There was certainly some common chord that helped Gotlieb press Canada's case in Washington. He was the shrewd operator who ingratiated himself with Ronald Reagan's closest advisers, and pioneered aggressive advocacy in Congress. His wife was the striving hostess who penned satirical columns in the Washington Post that left Ottawa bureaucrats apoplectic. It wasn't all champagne and caviar, or, in the Gotliebs' case, Winnipeg goldeye. Canadian critics griped about the entertainment bills. A former White House deputy chief of staff turned lobbyist, Michael Deaver, hired to raise Canada's profile, was investigated for corruption and convicted of perjury. Sondra was so overcome by the stress of last-minute seating arrangements for a Mulroney visit that she gave her social secretary an undiplomatic slap, making headlines in both countries. But it was all part and parcel, as Gotlieb tried to chronicle, of "the enormity, if not the futility, of the task of promoting and defending the interests of Canada in a country which has so long taken us for granted."

Gotlieb's ambassadorship began inauspiciously. When he first arrived at the White House in December 1981 to present his credentials, he was "lumped together with the representatives of Gabon, Upper Volta, Tunisia, Ireland, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines." The ceremony lasted seven minutes. "No doubt this was a mark of our special relationship," he writes. When he called on the legendary Democratic Speaker of the House, Thomas "Tip" O'Neill, there were another 18 or so people waiting for an audience. "He pumps my hand," Gotlieb writes of his turn. "I tell him who I am. He smiles, graciously, tells me what a great country I represent, and moves on. The interview lasted 30 seconds." When calling on members of Congress, Gotlieb concludes, "One always feels as though he is begging. One is. The challenge: how to beg and keep one's dignity."

The answer, it turns out, was to embrace Jane Austen's dictum that everything happens at parties. "Success in Washington means access, and access requires contacts," Gotlieb writes. "Here, the social event is the playing field where contacts are 'won.' " Soon he and Sondra were cutting a swath through the social scene. "Last night we dined at Joe Alsop's [a long-time journalist and fabled host], the innermost of the inner sanctums of the Georgetown snobs," states one typical entry. "We ate caviar, drank vodka, and had a swell time." He also quickly learned to trust no one. There is a running concern through the diaries that the Americans had cracked a secret Canadian code and were intercepting embassy messages; plus, the embassy leaked like a sieve.

Meanwhile, the self-described "poor little Canadian ambassador" shows little patience for the less-exalted functions of his post. When a well-lubricated audience in Halifax exhibited little interest in his discourse on protectionism in shipping, "I gave the bastards what they deserved. I read the whole speech slowly. And it was long and technical." On an official trip to Knoxville, Tenn., he noted, "the Canadian entertainment was unspeakable. I wandered through a sea of unknown faces, repeating to myself, 'You are the Canadian ambassador to the United States. Be polite. Be dignified. Smile. It's worthwhile.' " When a journalist called it "scandalous" that he hadn't invited visiting Canadian labour leaders to a reception, Gotlieb says, "I wanted to tell him to fuck off, but I just walked away."

Some of Gotlieb's controversial moves are now standard practice: for example, reaching beyond the State Department and making Canada's case directly to Congress. (For his early attempts, Gotlieb was accused of "meddling" in American affairs, and a congressman tried to have him recalled.) Likewise, he emphasized courting the anonymous yet powerful staffers on congressional committees, as well as prominent journalists. "I would never have dreamed of how important journalists are in Washington," he writes. "My views were shaped by 20 years in Ottawa dealing with the semi-educated press corps there."

One insight is particularly relevant today, as Canada faces post-9/11 security initiatives likely to complicate border crossings, threatening tourism and trade. Gotlieb observes that diplomatic disputes frequently arise not out of White House decisions, but from the rulings of faceless bureaucrats at federal agencies that Canadians neglect at their peril: "Crises caused not by the foreign policy of the United States but by the actions of assholes occupying obscure positions in obscure agencies."

Gotlieb also pressed for using U.S. business groups to lobby lawmakers, a practice that has been crucial to managing the border issue: "No one cares a farthing if a foreign country comes whining at the door," he says. "They do worry, however, if their own special interests whine. So to fight uranium import controls, alert the power utilities who will have to pay higher prices and urge them to lobby. To fight duties on subway cars, get the municipalities to squeal. To fight gas import controls, get the consumers to complain. They are worth 10 ambassadorial calls." He also concludes that Canada has no "friends" in Washington, only "interests," unlike other countries who have congressmen who espouse their position as a matter of their own political interests. "Israel has a constituency, Italy has a constituency, Greece has a constituency; Canada has none." As a result, he presses Canada to hire lobbyists and consultants, like any other interest group.

Gotlieb's diaries show early opposition to what has become the current policy of allowing provincial officials to press their own diplomatic case. In 1982, he advised Ontario premier Bill Davis, "Don't lobby independently in Washington on acid rain or any other front. Keep your visiting officials on a tight leash. The Americans will triangulate for sure, and Canada will be the loser." When Alberta premier Peter Lougheed visited Washington, Gotlieb implored him not to visit Congress alone. "The visits of [Quebec premier René] Lévesque and Lougheed signal that we are a divided country," Gotlieb fretted. Nonetheless, Gotlieb admits the provinces have a point. After a meeting with Alberta cabinet ministers frustrated with Trudeau's National Energy Program, Gotlieb writes, "I heard a recurring question: how can we trust you as ambassador in Washington to press our interests when the federal government is the servant of Eastern interests and you are the servant of the federal government? I told them that was bunkum -- but it wasn't." Today, Alberta has its own envoy to Washington operating out of the embassy. Some rules are made to be broken.

By Luiza Ch. Savage, Maclean's

A Montreal expert's new guide teaches nervous beginners how to invest in art

2006-11-18T13:47:00.000+01:00

You may have seen this month's Vanity Fair with a soaking wet Brad Pitt on the cover, in boxer shorts. If the Pitt portrait appeals to you, the photographer who took it will do yours for $150,000. That's a bargain compared to what a "successful businessman" can spend these days for a picture to hang over the fireplace, says Tobias Meyer, the head of contemporary art at Sotheby's in New York. "It can cost as much as the whole apartment." He's referring to a place on Park Avenue. "Now, a great apartment in New York is $30 million, and a great Rothko is $30 million. The prices are not the prices," he says, "they're relationships to individual worth." But what if the price relationship to your individual worth amounts to a Van Gogh poster?

Lisa Hunter hopes that her new book, The Intrepid Art Collector: The Beginner's Guide to Finding, Buying and Appreciating Art on a Budget, will help the average Joe at least get a baby toe in the market. Hunter, who lives in Montreal, is an arts journalist and former editor at the American Museum of Natural History. "First of all," she said in a recent interview, "there's nothing embarrassing about having a poster hanging in your living room. I'm all for people having posters before they start to buy. They're a great way to know what you're going to want to live with."

For someone who loves van Gogh and wants more than a mass-produced poster, Hunter suggests buying authentic Japanese prints, an art form that profoundly affected the Dutch artist's style. "Japanese prints were originally intended as inexpensive decoration for the common people," writes Hunter. "That's why an impecunious artist like Van Gogh could afford them. Today, Japanese prints are highly collectible and still affordable." Hunter notes that an authentic Japanese print can be purchased for as little as $50.

Whether you're buying prints, an Oriental rug or contemporary art, Hunter emphasizes the importance of buying from a dealer who will, wherever possible, provide proper documentation of the work's provenance, and perhaps most importantly, refund your money if you discover you've been sold a fake. Get everything in writing, she advises. "Don't assume that forgeries happen only in the multi-million-dollar part of the art world. Fakes are common in the lower price range because collectors are more likely to be novices."

In the case of Inuit sculpture, one quick way to spot a knock-off is if the seller is displaying identical figurines. Real Inuit art is one of a kind. Also, the reproductions are often made from moulded synthetic. The genuine article is carved from stone and feels cool to the touch. Hunter's book also covers Native American art. "A Navajo blanket holds the record for the most expensive treasure ever uncovered on Antiques Roadshow, receiving an estimated half-million dollars. Be careful, though," she writes. "Many of the Navajo rugs you see for sale are fakes made in Mexico. A typical Navajo rug doesn't have any fringes. The majority of Mexican fakes [do]."

If you're buying an Oriental rug, Hunter advises making sure it's finely knotted. If it looks blurry, it's not knotted finely enough. And if the wool feels scratchy and brittle, it isn't good quality. Tastes change, she says, and right now long thin "runners" made for hallways are often bargains; "contemporary floor plans have fewer long hallways, so demand has dropped." If you decide to shop for a runner, beware of the ubiquitous "sale" signs offering 60 to 80 per cent off. "You can recognize a bad dealer when you hear a hard sell about how the rug is worth many times the sale price. If you start to hear the rug is 'museum-quality,' the question after that should be, 'Where's the exit?' "

If you're the type of person who has a "taste for speculation," and if the idea of discovering the Next Great Thing in contemporary art excites you, Hunter has this advice:

Buy young. Savvy collectors haunt the top art schools.
Focus on artists who live in New York or another major capital, she says. That's where the top dealers live.
Collect "difficult" art. If the work is gory or disturbing, most collectors won't want it hanging over their couches, no matter how many curators gush about its brilliance.
Take a second look at "has-beens" -- lists of artists who were included in career-making exhibitions like the Whitney Biennial or the P.S. 1 art show. Google them. See what they're up to. You might find something amazing.

By Julia McKinnell, Maclean's

The Neanderthal Code

2006-11-05T17:02:00.000+01:00

By Michael Dumiak, Archaeology

Will an extinct genome reveal what makes us human?

An argument that began 150 years ago with a stunning discovery in Germany's Neander valley may soon come to an end in an ultra-sterile lab at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. Genetic anthropologist Svante Paabo is teasing the genetic secrets out of bones that have lain buried as glaciers advanced and retreated over Europe. Today, the building is sweltering, the air conditioning is out, but Paabo is coolly confident that he has found a way to reassemble the genetic code of a Neanderthal who lived in Croatia 45,000 years ago and who may provide answers to some important questions: Were Neanderthals a separate species from us? Did they interbreed with modern humans? Do their genes survive in modern humans?

"The big picture is that modern humans came out of Africa and replaced Neanderthals," says Paabo, a bristly browed Swede with a penchant for wearing sandals and goofy socks. "The really important question is what the mutations are that became fixed in [modern] humans. What are these things that are unique to us with respect to Neanderthals?"

Finding these unique mutations could reveal the biological basis for the way that modern human brains developed, and how we acquired language and art. It may also settle the long-running debate between scientists who believe that anatomically modern humans came from Africa and gradually forced the Neanderthals into extinction, an idea called the Out-of-Africa theory, and those who believe that Neanderthals were among the archaic human species with whom anatomically modern humans interbred as they moved across the globe, an idea called Multi-Regional Evolution.

Nuclear DNA, the prize for genetic sequencing, contains the Neanderthal's full genetic code. Some of Paabo's earlier work focused on retrieving mitochondrial DNA from Neanderthal bones. (Mitochondria are the microscopic organdies that provide energy to our cells.) Those studies supported the Out-of-Africa theory by showing that no strains of Neanderthal mitochondria survive in modern humans. Because each cell has several mitochondria and only one set of nuclear DNA, mitochondrial DNA is much easier to find, but it only contains a small portion of the Neanderthal's genes. A new sequencing technique is allowing researchers to piece together the elusive nuclear DNA.

Finding Neanderthal nuclear DNA is like alchemy, only better. A small piece of Neanderthal bone is drilled out and dissolved into a test-tube solution. The sample is flown to a company called 454 Life Sciences in Branford, Connecticut. It is then poured into a machine that sifts through every miniscule fragment of DNA, discarding the 95 percent of recovered genetic material that comes from contaminants such as bacteria or people who have handled the bone. The process is like picking millions of needles out of billions of haystacks.

Even so, Paabo may have the entire Neanderthal genome sequenced in the next 18 months. As the pieces fall into place the biological differences between modern humans and Neanderthals will come into focus. One interesting marker is a gene labeled FOXP2, which researchers suspect plays a role in the development of language. By comparing the Neanderthal FOXP2 gene to the modern human and chimpanzee versions of the gene, Paabo believes he can determine whether Neanderthals were capable of developing complex languages, and that could help scientists determine whether language gave modern humans enough of a survival advantage to doom Neanderthals to extinction.

Neanderthals appeared about 230,000 years ago, evolving from a Homo erectus population that migrated to Europe from Africa about one million years ago. Starting about 40,000 years ago anatomically modern humans emigrating from Africa began pushing Neanderthals to Europe's fringes. Twelve thousand years later, the last Neanderthals were clinging to settlements in the Iberian peninsula. Were they killed off, were they starved into extinction, or did they blend into the modern population?

The debate over the Neanderthals' fate has been as hard-fought as our other culture wars. "If you bring any kind of biology into cultural evolution you are a Nazi. If you say anything bad about Neanderthals you are a racist. I'm oversimplifying, but I think it's the bottom line," says Jean-Jacques Hublin ("The New Neandertal," July/August 2005), director of the Max Planck Institute's human evolution department. "Some people are desperate to prove that Neanderthals invented, separately, the Upper Paleolithic before modern humans arrived." Hublin is referring to the period beginning roughly 40,000 years ago in Europe when people started making a wider variety of tools and the first artwork appeared.

Hublin clashes with researchers like Joao Zilhao at the University of Bristol, who discovered the remains of a child, dated to 24,000 years ago, with both Neanderthal and modern human characteristics that seemed to indicate the two groups interbred. "There is an idea that modern humans emerged out of Africa like the chosen people," he once told the London Observer. "Their arrival is portrayed almost like a Biblical event, these golden ones replacing debased Europeans, the Neanderthals. This is nonsense."

Sequencing the Neanderthal genome should provide a clearer picture of how much, if any, genetic material Neanderthals passed along to us. This is why Paabo is constantly asked whether Neanderthals had sex with modern humans. If so, Multi-Regional looks better; if not, and Neanderthal genetics differ widely from that of modern human, the Multi-Regional Evolution boat has got a hole in it.

Paabo's research is already showing differences between Neanderthals and modern humans, and he clearly backs the Out-of-Africa theory. He is tightlipped about the subject, citing pending publications. But a report in the journal Nature states his lab has already found substantial differences between the Y-chromosomes in Neanderthals and those in modern humans--another indicator that the groups did not interbreed.

Michael Egholm, a chemist and vice president of 454 Life Sciences, acknowledges that the preliminary data backs the Out-of-Africa theory. "We can see a lot about who Neanderthals were, and they do not belong to the same population as any modern humans."

But some of the grand old sparring partners in this argument are actually pretty sanguine. Chris Stringer of London's Natural History Museum, a leading Out-of-Africa proponent, figures the DNA record will support the idea that Neanderthals were a different species. "The interbreeding has quite got in the way of a lot of discussions. Milford and I have been talking past each other for 20 years on this one," Stringer says. "I regard them as a different species, but ... that doesn't say anything about whether they interbred with us or not."

University of Michigan paleoanthropologist Milford Wolpoff, the top Multi-Regional researcher, doesn't think the DNA record will show that at all. "You've got to think to yourself that Neanderthals were never more than one or two percent of the human population, and we make an awful lot of them," he says. Wolpoff has high hopes for ancient DNA analysis; he expects it will show at least some Neanderthal genes survive in modern Europeans.

Ancient dna analysis is having a spillover effect beyond genetics and anthropology. Its sparking new rays of looking at scientific puzzles and prompting archaeologists to contend with genetics as a potentially vital tool. For a practice that is only 20 years old, that's remarkable. "If you would have asked me two years ago, I'd have said there is no chance that we would be looking at ancient nuclear DNA," Wolpoff says. "Here Svante's doing it. I'm glad I didn't say anything, because I would have been wrong."

Cross-disciplinary molecular archaeology departments and research centers are popping up at universities around the world, including an American Association of Anthropological Genetics with 80 members. Migration and domestication patterns are two of the many areas being explored with this new technology

But there are limits. More recent DNA is too similar to modern DNA. "It's been very frustrating. I actually started out as an Egyptologist," Paabo says. "My aim was to look at the history of Egypt and say, 'Well, we know Alexander the Great comes to Egypt. Does that make a genetic difference? Or was it only political?' We can't distinguish these things genetically."

DNA analysis remains a slow and expensive process, so researchers say the days of measuring fossils with calipers are not going away soon. Egholm, on the other hand, is in the business of optimism, and he believes the limits can be overcome. "If one can sequence Neanderthal DNA, if one can take a few nanograms of 40,000-year-old DNA and get a meaningful sequence out of that, you can sequence just about anything."

Sex Tricks From Skin Flicks

2006-10-22T21:17:00.000+02:00

9 ways adult movies can improve your sex life

WE'RE NOT HUGE FANS of adult movies, unless of course you can learn something from them. Then we're all for them! That's why we sent our sex writer home with 40 X-rated videos. When he emerged 3 days later broken and empty, he was still conscious enough to bring us these lessons for the bedroom.

Don't finish where you started
Three minutes is about as long as you'll see any two (or more) actors in the same sexual position; they'll reconfigure several times during a scene to keep things interesting. You should, too. It can keep you from ejaculating too soon.

Thrust one at a time
Penetrate slowly, then withdraw completely; wait a second and start over, 10 times. "insertion is everyone's favorite part of intercourse," says Mark Elliott, Ph.D., a sex therapist. (Maybe second favorite.) Repeating the initial insertion will help you savor the feeling. Be careful; you could like it so much that you finish before you're ready.

Use her legs
Have her lie on her back with one leg straight; the other leg should be pulled in toward her chest. Straddle her straight leg and support yourself with an arm hooked into the crook of her bent knee. "This allows good access, but because her legs are still together, she'll get lots of clitoral stimulation," says Elliott. That's a good thing.

Use your head
To keep your tongue from getting tired during oral sex, try sticking it out, closing your mouth around it, and moving your entire head. You'll last twice as long.

Bounce
If she's on top, have her sit still so you can do the bouncing--and control the speed of the friction. Bend your knees and use your thigh muscles. When you move up and down, you'll slide in and out. Stay in control so she doesn't slide all the way off.

Stay clothed
Usually, you get naked, then you have sex. Next time, try giving her oral sex through her panties. She'll like the way the damp cotton feels against her.

Stretch out
Have her lie flat on her back with her legs straight up in the air and her knees together. Kneel facing her, with your legs spread wide on the bed. Enter her with her feet resting over your shoulders. The advantage: You'll get deep, tight penetration without too much contortion.

Touch and tease
For a different sensation, use two fingers to stroke up and down to stimulate both sides of her clitoris without actually touching it.

Stop worrying about aim
You know her clitoris needs attention, especially as she nears climax. But it's hard to find such a tiny target when both your bodies are moving. Use the flat of your palm to make broad, quick circular motions around the front of her vaginal opening. That way, you're sure to hit the spot.

Source: Men's Health

Pest Control

2006-10-22T21:14:00.000+02:00

A woman was having a passionate affair with an inspector from a pest-control company. One afternoon they were carrying on in the bedroom together when her husband arrived home unexpectedly.

"Quick," said the woman to her lover," into the closet!" and she pushed him in the closet, stark naked.

The husband, however, became suspicious and after a search of the bedroom discovered the man in the closet. "Who are you?" he asked him.

"I'm an inspector from Bugs-B-Gone," said the exterminator.

"What are you doing in there?" the husband asked.

"I'm investigating a complaint about an infestation of moths," the man replied.

"And where are your clothes?" asked the husband.

The man looked down at himself and said,... "Those little bastards."

http://www.jokes.vaty.net/

Hahaha ))))) lol!!!

2006-10-02T23:32:00.000+02:00

Tru, Two

2006-10-01T09:19:00.000+02:00

In the summer of 2003, after two years of research and writing, Douglas McGrath finished "Infamous," his screenplay based on the life of Truman Capote. As he had promised to do, he called his friend Bingham Ray, who was the executive on his last film, "Nicholas Nickleby."

"Good news," said McGrath, who also co-wrote "Bullets Over Broadway" with Woody Allen, and adapted and directed "Emma." "I finished my script!"

"I know," Ray said. "I've got it on my desk!"

"And I paused," McGrath recalled the other day, over lunch at La Grenouille, "and I said, 'Uh, no you don't, because I have it on my desk.'"

"No, it's right here," Ray insisted. "'Capote,' by Dan—" There followed, McGrath said, "what is known in the Wasp community as a polite pause."

Ray had another Capote script on his desk. To make matters worse, this script, by Dan Futterman, concerned the same period in Capote's life that "Infamous" did—the years during which he was working on "In Cold Blood."

"It's very strange," McGrath said, sitting up straight on the burgundy-colored banquette. McGrath, forty-eight, has thin blond hair, very good manners, a slight Texas accent, and he speaks in perfect sentences. "I mean, generally I have my finger on whatever the opposite of the Zeitgeist is. What are the chances of two scripts about Truman Capote going out at the same time?"

Futterman's "Capote" ended up getting made first, and went on to earn an Academy Award nomination for best picture and an Oscar for its star, Philip Seymour Hoffman. "Infamous," with the unknown British actor Toby Jones in the lead role, went into production a few months after "Capote," but Warner Independent, which financed the film, decided to hold it for a year. It opens on October 13th.

There are precedents for this kind of thing. In 1989, Milos Forman's "Valmont" covered the same ground as Stephen Frears's 1988 hit "Dangerous Liaisons"; hardly anyone saw "Valmont." In 1997, two volcano movies appeared, "Dante's Peak" followed by "Volcano"; again, the second one suffered. However, in 1998 two comet-hits-the-earth movies were released—"Deep Impact" then "Armageddon"—and both were hits. The makers of "Infamous" prefer to focus on that example. But whether a five-foot-three-inch writer from Monroeville, Alabama, holds the same universal fascination as the end of the world remains to be seen.

"Infamous" is funnier and gayer than "Capote," and it also shows a lot more of the author's New York life amid his society-lady "swans." La Grenouille, which has been on Fifty-second Street just east of Fifth Avenue since 1962, is the setting for several scenes, one with Babe Paley, played by Sigourney Weaver, and another with Marella Agnelli, played by Isabella Rossellini. McGrath and his production designer re-created the restaurant at Troublemaker Studios in Austin, where much of the film was shot.

"There's something about the goldenness of the light that we could never quite capture," McGrath said, looking up toward the ceiling. "It's the silk wall fabric, but it's also the way the sunlight comes through the glorious flower arrangements."

McGrath was seated at Capote's old table, the first banquette on the left. The restaurant's owner, Charles Masson, who is the son of the founder, drifted by to say that Capote had liked this table because it was relatively hidden: people arriving instinctively looked farther back in the room.

McGrath has not seen "Capote," which he and his friends refer to as "Tom," for The Other Movie. "I don't want to get into the position of commenting on it artistically," he said.

McGrath is an excellent mimic, and throughout lunch he dropped into his own version of Truman, lolling sideways in the banquette, and sounding just like "what a Brussels sprout would sound like if a Brussels sprout could talk," as Michael Panes, the actor who plays Gore Vidal, says in the film. McGrath succeeded in conjuring the dead writer from the silky velvet corner that had been his perch, and for a few moments he made it seem that one could never have enough Tru. But then he had to run—he was off to present his film at the Toronto Film Festival. The shade of Capote departed with him, as the sunlight faded from the golden walls of the dining room.

By: Seabrook, John, New Yorker, 9/25/2006

Fresh Funny Pictures

2006-09-30T02:47:00.000+02:00

Freight

2006-09-27T13:51:00.000+02:00

In February of 1939, having failed to establish myself as a screenwriter in Hollywood, I decided to hitchhike back to New York, where my future wife waited. It was a bland California morning, pleasant and calm.

The rendezvous with my friend Royer, who was to take me to a road frequented by hitchhikers, was effected with a minimum of anxiety. I was early; he was a half hour late. He said little en route. Remarks about the highway, tags and scraps of nervous observations.

The miles slipped by all too quickly, covering only the merest jot of the great journey stretching before me, the great journey I would soon have to undertake unassisted, unbefriended, and in ignorance.

Where my highway toward El Centro and Royer's toward a walnut ranch forked he let me off. We shook hands. I stood a minute looking after the dwindling vehicle, loath to surrender my last connection to companionship, to someone concerned. The car disappeared around a curve in the road.

Undoubtedly I was too reticent, undoubtedly I was too shy. For all my tentative thumbing, my waggling and waving of arms, I got only as far as the next town, and by then the winter sun was already low in the west. A fellow-hitchhiker offered to guide me to the place he was going to stay: it was something better than a flophouse, he said, but not much.

About a mile hike brought us to the place, and it fitted his description—not much better than a flophouse on the Bowery, the chief difference being the absence of drunks standing, drooping and tattered, in the doorway. Evidently aimed at a clientele of transients like myself, it went by the improbable name of the Dew Drop Inn, and cost fifty cents a night per cubicle. Furnished with only a bed and a light, it was innocent of heat at night, with no showers in evidence, only lavatories and crappers. I was counselled by the occupant of the neighboring cubicle, a little wiseacre with a mustache, to make for Holtville, rather than the route that looked shortest, because it was better travelled and better for picking up rides.

It was a cinch to Holtville—the wise guy with the mustache was right. Effortlessly, I parlayed one ride into another, and reached Holtville early in the afternoon. And there I stuck. And not only I—a whole file of hitchhikers, ludicrous in our numbers, compared with the trickle of traffic going our way. The reason for the scarcity of vehicles wasn't hard to find: from Holtville to Yuma, Arizona, next leg of the journey, lay a stretch of road, fifty miles or more, through desert, devoid of towns. Not only did few autos and trucks make the trip, but for us hitchhikers only the whole trip was of any use. Otherwise, we'd be marooned in the middle of nowhere, in or between hamlets without names, tiny blank circles on a map. Though some trucks did pass by, truckers were enjoined by their insurance companies or by their employers not to pick up riders. The driver of the very infrequent passenger car that went all the way, who might have wished to give someone a lift, seeing that long file strung out along the highway, must have feared that he would be mobbed if he stopped for anyone.

The hours went by; so did the cars and trucks, but I advanced not a yard toward Yuma. And, as far as I could see, neither did anyone else, though most of us must have marched at least five miles back and forth in the hope of finding a more propitious station whereon to stab the air with our thumbs: futile Jack Horners were we. One heard the flinty jests of desperation: some guys had been here for three days (I could well believe it); some had applied for resident status. Many hitchhikers, I could see, having abandoned all hope of getting out of town eastward, had crossed the highway and were thumbing their way back west—and with far greater success. Anything to get out of Holtville, I thought. But then I learned that their aim was to backtrack to a railroad junction and hop a freight from there. To hell with the highways, they said.

I felt the same way myself. But, at a loss, I continued to stab the air with my thumb. Then I struck up with a short-statured wise guy. I thought for a moment that he was the one I had met in the flophouse the evening before, who had advised Holtville as my best bet. But he wasn't. This wise guy had no mustache. Nor would he ever have blown his last fifty cents for a flop, as I soon discovered.

He was as brash a guy as ever I met; his story was that he drove new automobiles from Detroit to California, which somehow enabled the dealer to avoid paying an entry tax. Now and then, he drove a "hot" car, a stolen car, from one state to another. In between, he sold used cars. He had been on a drunk for days. Now he was penniless. He had eaten nothing since yesterday; he was beating his way back to Texarkana, his home town. He knew all the ropes, all modes of travel, both highway—which he damned with heartfelt anathema—and freights. If only he could get to Yuma and the freight yards, wouldn't he show the rest of these lugs how to move? Acting with all the due circumspection of one who has only a few dimes on his person, after great deliberation I invited him into one of the truck stops for coffee and doughnuts. I now had a buddy. His name was Johnny Graham.

We thumbed in tandem now, buddies, but to no avail. Seeking luckier spots, we passed and passed again the prominent sign on the road that read: "Soliciting Rides Liable to Chain Gang."

"I'm gonna steal that goddam sign," Johnny threatened.

But night came, and, lit up by approaching headlights that never slowed down, the sign was still there. So were we. At last, miraculously, our symbiosis paid off. Because I treated him to another round of doughnuts and coffee in the truck stop, he and I were free to solicit drivers, our fellow-diners, directly. My polite entreaties got me only "Sorry, bud, it's my job." For all his brazen importunings, his truck-driver cant, his bold familiarity, Johnny didn't fare any better. A few times, truck drivers seemed on the point of yielding, but thought better of it. Then, at 2:15 A.M., Johnny's tactics paid off: "All right, you win," the trucker said.

In the back of the cab, behind the driver and his helper, was a concealed bunk, and that was to be our hidden roost for the next fifty miles. The truck butted through the freezing, thin night air, the treads of the heavy tires crooning to the highway asphalt. Through the bunk's portholes, single stars kept pace with us for long distances, steady as icy rivets. The truck slowed down, came to a stop. In the cold void, we heard a woman's voice, though we could see no one, a young woman's voice, cheery and clear, in greeting. And then the cab door opened, slammed shut; again the heavy vehicle lumbered into speed. Johnny and I merely looked at each other. All that mattered was that we were rolling toward Yuma. Perhaps another quarter to a half hour passed, and then the truck came to a stop. We heard the driver get out: "Far as I can take you, fellas." He opened the bunk door. "Can't take you into town."

"Sure! Sure!" We understood. We sprang from the bunk down to the highway. "Thanks, Mister. Thanks, pal. Thanks a million."

The truck stayed there, and we soon walked out of range of its dimmed headlights. Incurious, we did not turn at the sound of truck door opening, thudding closed. With hope renewed, we walked briskly toward the east, toward a horizon still seamless with night, starry, in quiet, keen air, and made out the first city lights about a half mile away: Yuma. And soon we were treading sidewalk.

The gleam of a diner pried into the dark street, promising warmth, food, coffee, against the inhospitable desert gloom behind us. "Coffee an'?" I invited.

"Sure would." Sheer animal hunger sounded in his plea.

We entered, into humid comfort, found stools, ordered—coffee and two doughnuts apiece (at a cost of ten cents each) and, asking the waitress to hold it a sec, took turns to the lavatory.

And now, refreshed, another brisk walk, to the freight yards, as the night sky streaked into abrasion of dawn. Johnny spoke to other hobos moving along the gravel lanes between freights, and we found a boxcar and clambered aboard. We congratulated ourselves on being alone, on having a private freight car. Alas, too soon. By the time the gray gravel between tracks shone in broad daylight, twenty more birds of passage had joined us. The door of the boxcar opened briefly on warm sunshine when a belated hobo climbed aboard, and rolled closed again. And finally, after those rumblings and bumpings, the mysterious joltings heralding the setting forth of freight trains, we clanked into motion, picked up speed, and were on our way. We rolled the door open to let in the sun. Some of us stretched out on the boxcar floor; some lay jackknifed against the walls; some sat. A gray bearded old hobo, a "bindle stiff," Johnny labelled him, methodically unfurled various-sized rectangles of blanket and, sighing tranquilly, with hands locked together, reclined on his improvised couch, his head propped up by a stained knapsack.

I found a place next to Johnny. I hadn't slept in twenty-four hours. Awhile I watched in gratitude as the spectacular Arizona landscape whizzed past the open boxcar door—sunny butte and sloping sunlit mesa. And then overpowering drowsiness meshed everything together into a single clacking carrousel. Ah, what was more wonderful than travelling by freight!

The train made a stop in Tucson. How long it would stay there nobody knew. For an hour or so, we joined the other hobos basking on the sun-warmed planks adjacent to the railroad street crossing. And then, bored, impatient, we strolled over to Main Street and, with the security of outcasts, studied the prosperous citizenry. A rodeo was due to be held that afternoon, so the town may have had more than its usual complement of visitors, and these and the notices of the coming diversion, and the air of anticipation engendered by it, beguiled us into loitering overlong. When we got back to the freight yard, our train had left.

Another was due in a little while, the hobos said. And, soon after, it thundered into the yard, slowing down, but only as if it meant to go on. I ran alongside at top speed, Johnny behind me. I had already been instructed never to grab the steel ladder at the end of a boxcar, but only the one at the beginning—in the direction the train was moving—because a miss on the rear ladder might mean plunging headlong under the wheels of the following car, while a miss on the front ladder would only send me slamming against the freight wall, and I would be hurled back, away from the train. So I made a grab for the front-end ladder, grasped, held on, climbed up to the catwalk atop the freight, knelt, clung to the catwalk—and the train suddenly stopped. Johnny howled with laughter.

"Jeez, that is funny," I said. "Risk your neck, and have the train stop."

"No. You're funny."

"Me?"

"You're hot shit, the way you grab a train on the fly." Johnny guffawed again. "If I ever saw anybody who couldn't make up his mind gettin' on a freight, it's you."

"Yeah? Why?"

"Chrissake, grab the goddam ladder. It ain't gonna bite ye."

Chagrined at my ineptitude, I followed Johnny along the catwalk, leaping the gap from car to car. But chagrin was a luxury I couldn't afford here; even reflecting on it was inadmissible for somebody being whittled down to nobody, just another hobo, and an incompetent one at that. Pay attention. Watch what you're doing.

"Here's a reefer," Johnny said. He pulled up the rust-covered hatch and peered down. "Nobody in it."

In the dark refrigerator compartment, its length running the width of the freight, and little more than a yard wide, a steel ladder, affixed to the wall, led down to the bottom. We descended, and looked back overhead, where the reefer hatch could be rigged ajar by an attached rod. Johnny climbed up a few rungs and set the rod.

"You got an extra handkerchief, right?"

"Yeah. What d'you want?"

"Gimme it, will ye?" And, taking the handkerchief, he wedged it under the supporting brackets of the tilted hatch. "That's so a brakey knows we're down here." He climbed down and explained: tramps asleep when the brakeman overhead locked the hatch in freezing weather—to protect the cargo—had been frozen to death when the car was left on a siding out of earshot.

"I get it."

The train began moving. We half sat, half reclined on the reefer floor. It was not a solid floor but a drainage floor: curved steel bars about a half-inch thick with two-inch spaces between them enabled the water of melting ice cakes in the summer to escape to a tray and the tracks beneath. The steel drainage scimitars pressed cruelly into my buttocks.

Johnny soon fell asleep. I lit my pipe, and watched smoke vent through the transom of the rigged hatch into the narrow dusk of day's end. The chill penetrated as the light faded . Soon, frigid dark roared into the confines of the empty ice compartment. How to pass the long night?

Long night awake…long night cold…long night on a freight, five days old…long night of clackety-clack, clackety-clack on wheels pounding eastward over the segmented tracks…

Howooo. Train whistled approaching a level crossing. What crossing? A crossing in Texas. How to pass the long cold night?

Why, writer manqué, are you not? Novelist manqué, no? Desperately balked of all the narratives that you tried, narratives that came to naught, no? Came to nort, all abort.

Why, sternly bring your faculties to a focus by composing an autobiography, freely associative…but governed by implicit rules of narration…augment suspense toward a climax…a climax that would exclude present distress. Hey, good ground rules: augment suspense toward a climax…that would exclude…the cold ache of legs as you lean against the swaying wall, the icy carving of the scimitar bars into butt…or shoulder…or flank, driving you upright again. Where would you begin? You already told them of your Lower East Side boyhood in one novel; what would you do, then?

No, what happens in this vision I have, in this early manhood, seems to defy the ground rules I just laid down. In this thundering crypt above the rails, I see my life as pivoting about certain crucial, certain critical points, where the event determined the rest, the lamentable sequence that followed inexorably in its wake. Clackety-clack. Clackety-clack. The year is 1914. Now, that's one year after the year in which my novel concludes. Right? Here's the nub of the disaster: Zayde and Baba (grandfather, grandmother), two uncles, and two aunts, one skip ahead of the Great War, depart Galicia, sell—Zayde does—the little gevelb, the little store, in the little hamlet of Veljish (on no map at all), which pays for second-class passage to Ameritchka, to New York, to join us. Now, were it not for that semi-Americanized whoremonger of a hotel waiter, my uncle Saul, who looked down his snooty beak at the East Side, and persuaded the Galitzianer pilgrims to settle in Harlem, ah, how different my history would have been, how different I. For Mom would have been content to remain on the East Side, in our lofty aerie overlooking the breezy East River, on Avenue D and Ninth Street. And I would not have been plucked out of my Orthodox Yiddish mini-state like a what? Vegetable, or a mandrake in Blake's etching. I would have grown up in unquestioned Orthodoxy, tough little cocksure fisticuffian gamin, who had to hide under the bed when mothers came looking for him for having bloodied their kids' noses. Me, I, alas, who in the course of a single year among the Irish on 119th Street in East Harlem went from a wiry kid to "Fat, fat, the water rat. Fifty bullets in your hat." Oh, don't blame the Irish.

I was outnumbered, and hung around Mom, even learning to embroider cloth between two hoops while I sat on the stoop beside her. Jewboy Achilles become Mama's boy, tied to her apron strings. Oh, don't blame the Irish. I should have fought, biffed and battled, for I was once good at it, and that was their language: biff and battle. I had nothing else to recommend me: poor eyes, maladroit, too, couldn't catch a ball and couldn't throw one, lousy at stickball. Who knew about such goyish sports on the East Side? Or marbles, or pitching pennies? But don't blame the Irish. A punch in the nose for a punch in the nose. Jew bastard! But oh, untroubled I had been in my milieu, amid jabbering Jews under the omnipotent sway of a Hebrew God. And then I was suddenly hurled into the alien and incomprehensible goyish maw of East Harlem. Wanna fight? No. So don't blame the Irish…

Go sit and brood, sit and brood, if you can rest your ass on serried scimitars.

But that was the first, that was the first switch in the tracks, I still insist. First major fork in life's journey. And clackety-clack and clackety-clack all you damn please.

The movers stole Mom's red coral beads. Red coral beads, red coral beads, Mom's mourned-for cherry-red coral beads. They disappeared in transit to Harlem.

But I got no support, I got no support. What the hell do you expect of a kid who had a timid mouse of a father, frightened, panicky, whacked the daylights out of me when Mrs. True from upstairs accused me of pushing her kid to the sidewalk, which I never did, but the pack of little goyim he was with ran when I turned in mock menace. She slapped me in front of Pop, and then he added a barbarous beating, so atrocious that dumpy, squat Mrs. Shapiro from the first floor intervened: "You'll destroy your own son for a goya?" And Mom arrived from shopping, frantic hearing my screams all the way through the hall, planting herself before Pop, the frenzied madman, and demanding of Mrs. True belligerently, "Vot you vant?"

Oh, my mother. How ugly, how lowering gloomy the kitchen setting. Oh, my mother. Beaten the hell out of, drubbed to a whimper, to a snivelling nullity—

Try rolling over to the other flank.

I can't say it often enough. They had no right to pluck me out like a radish, like a beet, like a scallion, like a parsnip from among my own. And force me to grow hydroponically, a root crop like me, that adored the dirt and the din of the twoscore streets of my Jewish mini-state. The irony of it: Zayde, given name Ben Zion, Orthodox Jew with a beard, comes to these shores with his family, and undoes Orthodoxy. You forget the anticipation, the delirious anticipation of the June day, sitting two flights up in the new apartment prepared for them by Saul and Mamie, my aunt, who lived across the street on 115th Street between Park and Madison, a nice "bitvinn" it was called. What did that little tyke imagine his newly arriving kinfolk would look like? Rich, generous, loving Jewish nobility come to rescue him from the unhappiness of the hostile goyish environment of 119th Street! Jewish nobility come to irradiate his unhappy home life! Empathetic, aye, opulent kinfolk, informed with novelty, with captivating fable, proffering handfuls of silver coins, endlessly doting, endlessly rejoicing in him.

Instead, getting out of the two taxicabs to the screams of hysterical Mamie from on high of "Tata, Tata! Oy, Mama, Mamaleh!" that drew the attention of all passersby within earshot on the street below were six ordinary, newly arrived, bewildered Jewish immigrants from Galicia in the erstwhile Austrian Empire.

With Saul overseeing the unloading of persons and baggage, amid commotion in the hall, the newcomers and their escorts ascended to the apartment. Everybody rushed in. Embraces ensued, resounding embraces. Under the supervision of Zayde, the newcomers were herded to the kitchen sink, and each rinsed his or her mouth with salt water. I swear, they rinsed it with something. Epsom salts? Nah. Go ask an Orthodox Jew. But that isn't the crux of the matter; the crux of the matter is, or was, that your dreams of noble permissiveness, openhanded, free-hearted affection, contracted into a bearded, paunchy Jew who spoke Yiddish so dense you could scarce make way against it, contracted into a Slavic, snub-nosed, gentle, dear, depleted Baba, with little gold-rimmed eyeglasses, dam of a dozen offspring. The older of the two immigrant uncles looked like Baba, stocky, aged eighteen, with a head of thick, wavy chestnut hair, and the younger uncle, long-nosed and straight-haired, dazed into reticence, stood apart, gangly and tall. One aunt, the older, was composed and slow-spoken, while the other aunt was green-toothed, erratic, and noisy with excitement. Both homely. I shrank. Too much to absorb, all their lopsided gesticulations, shrugging, their grimaces and outcries: "Oy, gevalt un azoy, oy, gevalt un azoy! Takeh emes? Un azoy! Oy ich khalesh un azoy!"

With Mom's permission to leave, with a nickel to comfort me, but still dejected, I walked to Central Park, and there climbed the granite outcrop atop the rowboat-dotted lake on 110th Street. And along a crease in the ground in a bosky grove where ran a little trickle of rainwater I became the buckskinned and fringed American Scout, self-reliant, self-sufficient, in the pristine wilderness of America I knelt down and drank, in ritual, dim commitment. Sipping from the polluted rivulet in much-trodden Central Park. That's not the crux; that's just a boyhood memory.

Oh, my legs ache, ache standing. But sitting down is scant comfort on a seat of sabres.

The brain incandesces and fades, synapses glow and gutter out. You left Judaism, right? Right, ol' boy, ol' boy. Left Judaism, and damn glad to. You go with Zayde on a sleepy summer Shabbes to the shul, to the prayer-book musty tenement ground-floor synagogue, sit hour after hour and daven where shown, pray but not know what for, glibly match the right sounds to the printed letters, as you were taught to do on the East Side. And Zayde's proud of you, his oldest grandson, sure, sure, growing up devout. But the thing wears threadbare for a kid, is a hell of a bore—even though, ah, that was fun, at the Havdalah service—Havdalah, wasn't it? Half a dollah. To be made much of by the other bearded Jews, Shloymeh F., Zayde's so dignified older brother, actually wore a shiny silk top hat on Shabbes, what a stereotype target for snowballs if he'd ever appeared in my part of Harlem, among the juvenile scamps, Shloymeh with his forked gray beard and proud bearing and rich clearing of the throat. And the other pious congregants offering the only urchin at the Havdalah wine and lovely segments of salt herring, and—man, when that hit my palate the first time!—ripe wrinkled Greek olives.

All right, all right, sit down, if you can't stand up anymore. But the novelty wasn't enough to keep you coming regularly. So you shirked. And you and little Eddy F., the Irish widow janitor's kid, became friends, and he showed you how to make tin-can telephones that stretched on a string from his flat on the ground floor to yours a flight up the worn stairs. And after many a fuzzy greeting, many a humming giggle and blurry message, you were well on the way to shedding your Judaism.

I stood up. Cold vacancy, interminable rattle and roar, my partner curled up in sleep, and a single blue star trailing like a distant kite, in and out of view. I'm tired of your yarn. The point is I'm here on this jigging jiggling freight. I survived. I'll wait the goddam night out. I'm surly, I'm rancorous.

Weariness thrust in abeyance by the sudden thud on the roof of the freight car, I looked up: thud. Someone had leaped from one freight roof to another. The reefer hatch was lifted. Density of a person obliterating his shape of night sky, bowed, "Who down dere?" under stars spreading all about him. "Hey, you—you down dere?" A Negro voice.

"We are!" I yelled up. And alarmed: "Hey, Johnny!"

"Wha'?"

"How many you down dere?"

Apprised in an instant, and instantly hostile: "There's two of us down here already. That's enough. We don't want no more."

The one overhead lingered for a moment, and then withdrew.

"Boy, it's cold up there right out in the open. I hope he finds someplace to hide," I said.

"He's a nigger. He'll find a place to duck. I never worry about 'em." Arkansas spoke through Johnny.

"I wonder where the hell he's been? Come out all of a sudden that way."

"He should have stayed wherever he was, God damn him. I was sleepin' good. I mighta slept all the way to El Paso." He reached for his cap, massaged his glimmering features, yawned noisily, his teeth gleaming at the terminal grunt.

An hour later, Johnny's glimmering face tipped up toward the roof. "You hear that?"

"I think so."

"Is that the nigger again?"

"I don't know."

"It can't be a shacky."

"No? Why not?"

"If he was closin' up the reefers, we'da heard them other hatches slam."

"You mean closed against the cold?"

"Yeah. It's that black bastard."

Certainty grew, grew as swiftly as the distant thud of someone landing on the catwalk at the farther end of the freight became bounding footsteps approaching. Desperate hands raised the hatch overhead.

"Hey, I'm comin' down, man. I'm freezin'."

"There's two of us down here already. I told you. Stay out!"

"Dere's three, fo' in de others. Dere's five in one."

"Bullshit. Keep goin'."

"Been over de whole freight, man. Dere's only two o' you." The voice was young. "I'm comin' down."

"You try it! I'm tellin' you, boy. Two's enough down here."

The figure peering down from above didn't seem so much uncertain as restrained, trying to sense by instinct what the temper was below, the forces he had to brace himself to confront.

"For Christ sake, let him come down," I whispered.

"What for? Fuck's too lazy to go all the way up to the locomotive. There's lots o' reefers."

"That hatch cover! Jesus, if he locked us in—You crazy?"

"I'm comin' down, man."

Raised all the way, the hatch opened into a transom gorged with stars. Cascades of starlight poured through the gaping sluice above as he stooped, took his first step down, his booted foot seeking the rung below; and before he closed the hatch, stemming the flood of starlight above him, something—something metallic—glinted in the same hand. Down he came to the reefer bottom—woefully underclad, only a jacket over his shirt. With hands in pockets, "Man, I'm cold. Gettin' out o' dat wind like comin' to a stove."

"It's all right," I said.

Johnny moved silently to my side of the compartment.

"I guess we got room," I said. "Where were you?"

"In a gondola. Layin' flat an' huggin' de bottom. Man, I like to freeze to death. I said I gotta get outa here, I gotta get outa here, 'fo' I freeze stiff. I tried ridin' behind a tank car. Too cold to live."

"You want a smoke?"

"Sleep. Dat's what I want, man." He took his hand out of his jacket pocket. "I 'fraid to go to sleep in dat gondola. If I fall asleep in dat gondola, dey pick me up froze harder'n a rock. This is the fust time I feel safe to sleep."

Drawing his knees up, his small hat jammed down on his head, he slipped to the reefer floor, and as he turned on his side he retrieved a short length of glinting metal from his jacket pocket, slid the hand holding the object between the curved steel bars of the drain, and deposited the glinting piece on the drip pan beneath. He was asleep in a minute—coughed himself awake; his hand groped between drainage bars, and, reassured, he stretched out his legs as far as he could, hat still jammed down on his small head, motionless, audibly, he fell asleep.

"He's got a knife," Johnny whispered.

"I guess so."

"Son of a bitch. That's why he come down. Two of us, he figured, an' he's got a knife."

"What the hell's the difference?" I hissed. "He's asleep, isn't he? That's all he wanted."

"How do you know?"

"Oh, bullshit." The pervasive shadowy Jew in the background flinched against myriad wounds suffered in centuries past. "Listen, Johnny, I'm not going to argue about it. It's a waste of time. You want to stretch out and go to sleep? Go ahead. I can't sleep. I'll—I'll watch."

"I'm not afraid of him. It ain't that. They're all yeller anyway. It's just that nobody else'd let him down, an' we did. Shit, they'd tell him there was six in the reefer."

An angry silence. Better keep quiet. Futile: you'll never penetrate that barrier; you don't even understand it, can't put it into words. Screwy. No more sense than a puppy dog chasing his tail. Think of something else.

I slid down to his end of the steel bars of the drainage floor. "Ow." Released from aching knees, I welcomed the few minutes of respite before the rigid scimitars against my buttocks supplanted old pain with new.

"I can see what he's got." Johnny settled beside him.

"You can?" Listlessly, "What?"

"Table knife, that's all. It's no goddam razor."

"All right. I got a jackknife. How's that?"

"Better git it out an' keep it open. Just keep it open in your jacket pocket."

"Oh, for Christ sake." Peevishly, I rolled my rump away from the biting drainage bars, pulled the jackknife out of my back pocket, opened the three-inch Boy Scout blade, and exhibited it.

"You stab with it," Johnny said. "Go right for the belly. Know what I mean? You hold the blade down with your thumb and stab."

"Oh, nuts." I dropped the open jackknife into my jacket pocket.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," I retorted angrily. "You know what I think? You got it ass backward. That poor colored guy is carrying that cheesy knife to protect himself. That's why. They wouldn't let him into any of the reefers. You can tell why he came down here. If he was going to fight for his life to keep from freezing, we were his best chance. Jesus, can't you see that? The guy's sleeping on that goddam steel like a feather bed. Look at him. He hasn't moved an inch in all this time. Doesn't hear us. Anything. He's absolutely worn out."

"Worn out, my ass. He's used to it. You don't know these fuckin' niggers. They're tougher'n rawhide."

"O.K. I've had enough. I don't want to talk about it anymore."

Bang and jerk of freight-car coupling. Each time the car slacked its motion over flat Texas, I reflected, the locomotive had to jerk it onward. That goddam boob and his nigger nuttiness had me sitting here with an open Boy Scout knife in my jacket pocket. Christ, absent-minded as I was—and cold—I was apt to cut myself before I cut anybody else. I ought to snap the blade closed before I thrust my hand in my pocket to warm my fingers. Boy, that crazy Arkansas bastard. Wasn't he crazy?

"Want the tobacco?" I made a peace overture.

"Nah…Thanks. I'm beginnin' to feel like a little shut-eye again."

"Yeah? Wish I could say the same. I feel it, but it doesn't do me any good."

"What're you gonna do? Be a watchman till light?"

"I don't know. It looks that way."

"Aw, let's have a smoke, if you're not going to sleep. O.K.?" I brought out the can of Prince Albert. We rolled cigarettes, struck a match, lighting up the thin, jackknifed form sound asleep on the gleaming steel drainage bars. We smoked in silence.

Nothing to do. Lead the way. Pretend to sleep. Maybe the guy would follow suit, and we could drop the subject. I mashed the half-smoked cigarette against a drainage bar, curled on my side. Room enough for my shoes to the side of the sleeper's boots…

The stratagem worked. In a few minutes, when I cautiously lifted my head to peer, with arm pillowing face, Johnny's dark form lay bunched in sleep. Jesus, the arch-enemies, offset, end to end, nether to nether, like a what? Couldn't think of anything. Feet to feet. Two feet to feet. Eine kleine Nachtmusik…in a reefer…

That was sleep coming on, sleep. Ah, sleep, it is a precious thing, beloved from pole to pole…Oh, threshold, beautiful threshold of let go.

Utterly spent, I slept until after daybreak, until after morning light was framed in the rigged hatch overhead, unaware that my two fellow-travellers were standing hunched over at opposite walls of the reefer, saying little. I awoke when the freight's tempo changed, the slowing down of motion allowing the distinct creak of car and train tracks beneath to emerge from the roar.

"We comin' to de yahds," the young Negro said, slender and limber, now that I could see him—and chipper, too, in movement. He had apparently slept the night through from the minute he lay down.

"We're gittin' to El Paso," Johnny said. "C'mon, wake up. We got to get ready to get off her."

Dreary and stiff, I got to my feet.

"No bull ketch me climbin' down," the Negro youth announced confidently. "Ah run him a race on de roof to a gondola, an' den oveh de other side."

"Yeah? What if he pulls a gun?"

"Ah jump the other side of de freight, man, like I tol' you, 'fo' I let him pistol-whip me."

He seemed capable of it, too, lithe and agile. And as the train kept up its moderate, even rate of speed, he knelt down on one knee, slipped his brown flat wrist through the space between the drainage rails, and brought out the ordinary table knife we had seen him secrete there the night before. The streaked roughness of the crudely sharpened blade flashed a moment in daylight. He dropped it into his jacket pocket. Dully, I weighed his motives. Certainly he wouldn't dare—against a railroad bull, a man armed with a gun?

In Texas? Jesus, he'd be lynched! Why had he waited until daylight to retrieve the weapon…to display it?

Johnny's warning interrupted my foggy groping. His words came in a lowered voice and with a kind of worried severity, and, to my surprise, were not about the Negro youth. "You see one, a big guy—"

"Who?"

"A railroad bull, for Chrissake. You gotta get down an' away fast. You woke up yet?"

"Yeah. What does he do? Wait for every freight that comes in?"

"No. But you never know when he's around. Loosen up. Stamp your feet, wave your arms. C'mon."

"Jesus, I had a helluva night."

"He won't give a shit about that. Loosen up." He moved his own arms in prompting, kept a steady gaze on the Negro youth.

Who smiled. "Yeah, man, y'gotta git ready to hightail it outa them yahds. What if he Texas Slim?" He allowed himself a gleeful chuckle. "He fast on his feet."

The freight slowed, slowed, jarred, came to a clashing stop, though we still felt in motion. Already the Negro youth had mounted the ladder and was climbing. Speedy and sure, his arm thrust back the hatch. Another rung upward and he heaved himself into open air; he sprang into daylight and disappeared. By the time I mounted the lower rungs, I could hear him climbing down the outside. And up, Johnny crowding behind me let the hatch fall back. Broad daylight. Blue dome of sky. Freight-car roofs in all directions. I had lived through it.

I jumped off the bottom rung down to the ground. But the Negro youth was tarrying there, and now I could guess, guess with a degree of certainty, at the same time oddly conscious that I felt no alarm. Standing between ramparts of brick-red and yellow freights, open gondolas, and tank cars, the brown youth in the small, earth-colored hat eyed us, me in particular, right hand in jacket pocket.

"Ah'm hungry, man."

"So're we," Johnny said.

"Sell you my boots, man." He pulled up his pants, bringing into view stockingless, lean brown shins above the edge of typical cowboy boots. "What y'all say? Sell 'em to yo' fo' jest a little money."

The thoughts that scurry through the mind: the whole proposition was preposterous. What the hell was he going to wear? And walk on this gravel? On streets? And in the cold? His wily eyes in his small head, watchful of every move, his wiry, quick body, ready for something, practiced, free and supple as a lynx. And a wickedly sharpened dinner knife hidden in his jacket pocket. And the two of us, yes, Johnny, shallow hard guy, and I, uncertain, untried, had to think of a way out of this, this emergency. Who the hell wanted his boots? He just wanted me to show some money. Forestall him somehow. Say O.K., and ask him how much, ask him to take them off. "Listen," I said solicitously, "you need those boots. How're you gonna get around?"

"Ah needs breakfas' mo'n ah needs these boots right now."

"Well, that's different. You'd be crippled without boots. Wait a minute."

Large-eyed, askance, and as sidelong as a profile out of Egypt, he watched me, the knuckles of his left hand bulging out the thin cloth of the jacket pocket. I fished into my topcoat. I knew there was a dime among the change there. I didn't want to show any more money than that. But I had forgotten the open Boy Scout knife. It nicked me. Strange, strange: collapsed into unimaginable density as they say happened to a neutron star, all my history seemed in that instant, all its tenets, its dictates. Johnny beside me became tense, as my fingers avoided the open blade and fished for the dime. "Here, keep your boots. Take this dime. Get yourself something to eat." I handed the youth the dime, conscious of Johnny's scowl.

"Thanks, man." Lissome again, he took the coin; or, rather, he accepted it, entirely without subservience or obligation, but with a short, triumphant laugh, turning, swiftly, strode jauntily away into the motley perspective between converging freights.

"What the hell'd you give him the dough for?" Johnny's tough visage grimaced. Under the visor of his cap his brow furrowed in a scowl; even his short body all but flapped in a spasm of wrath, so pronounced it gave one the impression of a ripple contrary to the wave, pulses contrary to his stride. We hurried toward a break in the double lines of freights. "We coulda took care of him."

I couldn't help but grin. "Maybe."

"What d'ye mean, maybe? I wouldn't let no nigger ride over me."

"I know." But my mind seemed to be sifting out something worth a minute's consideration. A kind of insight: that wasn't the way—this was the important thing—a Negro was supposed to behave. That was it: not the cocksureness, no; then what? A sense of equality, independence. Sure, he had deliberately displayed the weapon to cow us. Or he would have grabbed the dough and run. And he was fast enough to get away. O.K. Whatever. Was I imagining things? Was it really a sign of change? A new stance of the Negro, a new attitude. "It's only a dime."

Johnny seemed to be going through some kind of parallel evaluation, but one that reached an entirely opposite judgment: "Sure it's only a dime. But you let him git the better of you, you let him git ahead of you."

"Oh, balls." I tossed my head. "Get into a fight with a guy with a knife. For a dime?"

"I told you we oughta git that cheese dagger away from him while he was asleep. You saw him."

"Well, we didn't. And now get your throat slashed for ten cents."

"He never would've. If we jumped him together, never. If he'd knowed you had a open jackknife, he never would've tried it."

"Well, it wasn't open."

"What for you got your finger scratched?"

"I don't know. Must have done it some other time." Johnny clawed the air in frustration.

"Jesus." I tried to shunt the conversation into other channels. "He turned out of sight about here, didn't he?" I leaned forward to squint ahead. "How come we can't find it?"

"We're comin' to it. There. I can see the snubbers at the end o' the tracks. Trouble is you Northe'ners don't know niggers. You keep lettin' 'em git more an' more outa their place. They'll git us all down that way."

"O.K. I see it. Boy, look at those lines of freights behind us."

"It's El Paso. It's a big junction."

Grumpy with each other but trying to reach an accommodation of necessity, knowing that we had to, we let the subject drop. With Johnny leading the way, in silence, like a short bridge to the commonplace, we rounded the spring snubber at the end of a line of freights and tramped out of the yard up the incline to the blacktop highway at the edge. We were now off railroad property, out of danger, in the clear, a couple of grouchy, slouchy, seedy hobos walking by the run-down dwellings at the outskirts of El Paso.

(The above is adapted from the almost two-thousand-page unedited novel manuscript that Roth was working on in the early nineteen-nineties.)

By: Roth, Henry, New Yorker, 9/25/2006

Story of the Year

2006-09-24T21:10:00.000+02:00

"A son and his father were walking on the mountains.
Suddenly, his son falls, hurts himself and screams: "AAAhhhhhhhhhhh! !!"
To his surprise, he hears the voice repeating, somewhere in the mountain: "AAAhhhhhhhhhhh! !!"
Curious, he yells: "Who are you?"
He receives the answer: "Who are you?"
And then he screams to the mountain: "I admire you!"
The voice answers: "I admire you!"
Angered at the response, he screams: "Coward!"
He receives the answer: "Coward!"
He looks to his father and asks: "What's going on?"
The father smiles and says: "My son, pay attention."
Again the man screams: "You are a champion!"
The voice answers: "You are a champion!"
The boy is surprised, but does not understand.
Then the father explains: "People call this ECHO, but really this is LIFE.
It gives you back everything you say or do.
Our life is simply a reflection of our actions.
If you want more love in the world, create more love in your heart.
If you want more competence in your team, improve your competence.
This relationship applies to everything, in all aspects of life;
Life will give you back everything you have given to it."
YOUR LIFE IS NOT A COINCIDENCE. IT'S A REFLECTION OF YOU!"

Get your mojo working with our expert advice on reclaiming your libido

2006-09-22T23:21:00.000+02:00

Women's Health Specialist

If your libido lags at times, don't worry, it often comes roaring back. To keep it consistent, try stimulating your brain first. Read erotic literature, watch sexy movies, investigate self-pleasure aids such as lubricants or vibrators. Your brain will get you going.

If you've been in a relationship for a long time, you and your partner may be relating sexually in stale ways. Sex needs to be fun and novel. Go away together and rediscover each other, learn about sensual massage, make it a priority to rejuvenate your sex life. Midlife is the perfect time to reinvent yourself sexually and surrender to your feelings. Menopausal women have been made to believe they're not sexual, but many can have the best sex of their lives after menopause.

— Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of The Wisdom of Menopause (Bantam, 2001)

Naturopath

Loss of libido is often brought on by hormonal changes that occur during menopause — specifically, a dip in testosterone production. In these cases, I usually start with the herb damiana, which may help to stimulate sexual arousal. I use damiana in tincture form and often combine it with panax ginseng, another herb that may help stimulate sexual arousal and could also increase testosterone levels.

If that's not effective, the next step is to try the steroid hormone dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), which is a precursor to hormones like estrogen and androgen. I start my patients with 15 to 20 mg of DHEA, but only if blood results reveal a deficiency. If you decide to take DHEA, talk to your doctor about monitoring your levels of the hormone by regularly testing your blood.

— Jane Guiltinan, N.D., director of the Bastyr University Natural Medicine Institute for Women's Health

Sex Therapist

Some of the best ways to improve your sex drive have nothing to do with sex. One of the most important things is to have an interest you feel passionate about — even if it's needlework. It can be anything from social activism or working out at the gym to dancing or a love of the arts. You need that passion to keep you energized.

Reevaluate your living space to be sure it's conducive to having sex. If your bedroom is cluttered with a computer, TV, office items, and exercise equipment — all of which are huge sexual turnoffs — redo the space so it's more inviting, incorporate peach and other pastel and skin-tone colors in your paint and bed linens, and decorate with art you find erotic. It could be a sensual painting, a goddess statue, or anything else that speaks to you personally.

— Barbara Keesling, Ph.D., author of Sexual Healing (Hunter House, 2006)

By: Northrup, Christiane, Guiltinan, Jane, Keesling, Barbara, Natural Health, Sep2006

Airline Comedians

2006-07-29T16:28:00.000+02:00

All too rarely, airline attendants make an effort to make the in-flight "safety lecture" and their other announcements a bit more entertaining. Here are some examples that have been heard or reported:

On a Continental Flight with a very "senior" flight attendant crew, the pilot said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, we've reached cruising altitude and will be turning down the cabin lights. This is for your comfort and to enhance the appearance of your flight attendants."

On landing the stewardess said, "Please be sure to take all your belongings. If you're going to leave anything, please make sure it's something we'd like to have."

"There may be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are only 3 ways out of this airplane."

"Thank you for flying Delta Business Express. We hope you enjoyed giving us the business as much as we enjoyed taking you for a ride."

As the plane landed and was coming to a stop at Washington National, a lone voice came over the loudspeaker: "Whoa, big fella. WHOA!"

After a particularly rough landing during thunderstorms in Memphis, a flight attendant on a Northwest flight announced, "Please take care when opening the overhead compartments because, after a landing like that, sure as hell everything has shifted."

From a Southwest Airlines employee: "Welcome aboard Southwest Flight XXX to YYY. To operate your seat belt, insert the metal tab into the buckle, and pull tight. It works just like every other seat belt and if you don't know how to operate one, you probably shouldn't be out in public unsupervised."

"In the event of a sudden loss of cabin pressure, masks will descend from the ceiling. Stop screaming, grab the mask, and pull it over your face. If you have a small child traveling with you, secure your mask before assisting with theirs. If you are traveling with more than one small child...pick your favorite."

"Weather at our destination is 50 degrees with some broken clouds, but we'll try to have them fixed before we arrive. Thank you, and remember, nobody loves you, or your money, more than Southwest Airlines."

"Your seat cushions can be used for flotation; and, in the event of an emergency water landing, please paddle to shore and take them with our compliments."

"Should the cabin lose pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the overhead area. Please place the bag over your own mouth and nose before assisting children...or other adults acting like children."

"As you exit the plane, make sure to gather all of your belongings. Anything left behind will be distributed evenly among the flight attendants. Please do not leave children or spouses."

And from the pilot during his welcome message: "Delta airlines is pleased to have some of the best flight attendants in the industry. Unfortunately, none of them are on this flight!"

Heard on Southwest Airlines just after a very hard landing in Salt Lake City: The flight attendant came on the intercom and said, "That was quite a bump, and I know what y'all are thinking. I'm here to tell you it wasn't the airline's fault, it wasn't the pilot's fault, it wasn't the flight attendant's fault...it was the asphalt!"

Overheard on an American Airlines flight into Amarillo, Texas, on a particularly windy and bumpy day. During the final approach, the Captain was really having to fight it. After an extremely hard landing, the Flight Attendant said, "Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to Amarillo. Please remain in your seats with your seat belts fastened while the Captain taxis what's left of our airplane to the gate!"

Another flight attendant's comment on a less than perfect landing: "We ask you to please remain seated as Captain Kangaroo bounces us to the terminal."

An airline pilot wrote that on this particular flight he had hammered his ship into the runway really hard. The airline had a policy which required the first officer to stand at the door while the passengers exited, smile, and give them a "Thanks for flying XYZ airline." He said that, in light of his bad landing, he had a hard time looking the passengers in the eye, thinking that someone would have a smart comment. Finally everyone had gotten off except for a little old lady walking with a cane. She said, "Sonny, mind if I ask you a question?" "Why no Ma'am,"said the pilot. "What
is it?" The little old lady said, "Did we land or were we shot down?"

After a real crusher of a landing in Phoenix, the Flight Attendant came on with, Ladies and Gentlemen, please remain in your seats until Capt. Crash and the Crew have brought the aircraft to a screeching halt against the gate. And, once the tire smoke has cleared and the warning bells are silenced, we'll open the door and you can pick your way through the wreckage to the terminal."

Part of a flight attendant's arrival announcement: "We'd like to thank you folks for flying with us today. And, the next time you get the insane urge to go blasting through the skies in a pressurized metal tube, we hope you'll think of US Airways."

A plane was taking off from Kennedy Airport. After it reached a comfortable cruising altitude, the captain made an announcement lover the intercom: "Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Welcome to Flight Number 293, nonstop from New York to Los Angeles. The weather ahead is good and, therefore, we should have a smooth and uneventful flight. Now sit back and relax - OH, MY GOD!" Silence followed and after a few minutes, the captain came back on the intercom and said: "Ladies and gentlemen, I am so sorry if I scared you earlier, but while I was talking the flight attendant brought me a cup of coffee and spilled the hot coffee in my lap. You should see the front of my pants!" A passenger remarked, " The captain should see the back of my pants."

Funnies by new-love.ru

2006-07-29T16:21:00.000+02:00

See full collection on http://new-love.ru/a-humor

A strange kind of freedom Wrongly sent to Guantanamo, rejected by the world

2006-06-15T17:15:00.000+02:00

Five ethnic Uighurs from northwest China suffered through four years in Guantanamo Bay only to be dumped by the U.S. in one of Europe's poorest nations, which now says they are unwelcome and must leave.

One country, China, has eagerly offered to take in the men - so it can prosecute them as pro-independence terrorists and, many believe, execute them.

Albania's decision to deny sanctuary to the Uighurs, who were apparently swept up by bounty hunters in Pakistan in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and turned over to the U.S., isn't based on security fears. The Pentagon decided at least a year ago they weren't "enemy combatants" and pose no threat.

In an interview, Argita Totozani, Albania's National Commissioner for Refugees, said cultural reasons are behind her country's decision not to follow through on a U.S.-brokered deal to grant political asylum to the five.

"Their future is not here," she said. "There is not a Uighur community (here). They don't speak any Albanian ... There is no integration possibility for them here. We realized their future is not in Albania."

Now, U.S. government lawyers are casting around for another country, other than China, willing to take the Uighurs and, Totozani said, Canada is on the list.

"They are trying to find a resettlement somewhere else - in America or Canada," she said. "I've heard they have relatives in Canada. There is a good community in Canada for Uighurs."

The U.S., however, is apparently not an option.

A senior State Department official, who insisted on anonymity, said in an exchange of emails that it was an "administrative decision" to deny the men an opportunity to resettle in the U.S. and to instead reach out to more than 100 other countries.

"It was determined that the Uighurs would be resettled in another country. They expressed a preference for a European country," with the knowledge they couldn't go to America, the official said.

The administration of President George W. Bush has not publicly explained why the men cannot resettle in the United States, but the State Department has apparently told the Albanians.

"Because of the atmosphere and the Sept. 11 story, the Americans would not really want Guantanamo Bay ex-prisoners to be part of their society," Totozani said. "It's not that easy to persuade Americans about their innocence."

Sabin Willett, a Boston attorney who represents the Uighurs, says the administration wanted his clients out of the U.S. so it wouldn't have to defend its handling of the Guantanamo Bay prison in federal court.

He says his clients were abruptly put on a plane and flown to Albania on Friday, May 5 - the last business day before the Washington, D.C., Court of Appeals was to hear arguments over his clients' legal rights.

"They wanted to avoid a ruling by the court of appeals that might limit their heretofore unlimited discretion to do whatever they want with people in Guantanamo Bay," Willet said in a telephone interview. "I think they also wanted to avoid public and judicial scrutiny of the big lie of Guantanamo, which is that it is a terrorist detention facility."

But the State Department insists there was nothing untoward about the timing of the men's abrupt departure for one of the poorest countries in Europe.

"It was only in April 2006 that we reached an agreement with the government of Albania, and we did not want to hold the detainees any longer than necessary," the official said.

Washington has praised the Albanian government for taking in the Uighurs, and insists they would readily assimilate in the predominantly Muslim country because of their shared faith. But not one of Albania's 3.5 million citizens speaks the Uighurs' distinct language.

The majority of Muslims in Albania are Sunnis, whereas Uighurs - who hail from the Xinjiang area of northwest China which had a brief independence as East Turkestan before World War II - practise a moderate, Sufi-tinged form of Islam.

While the U.S. tries to find a home for the men, China has sent a delegation to Tirana to pressure the Albanians to return them. The group Human Rights in China accuses Beijing of religious and ethnic persecution of Uighurs, detaining, torturing and even killing peaceful activists while harassing ordinary practitioners. Washington is opposing China's efforts to get the men. Totozani said Albania is refusing China because it has the death penalty.

Even if Albania reverses its decision to expel the men, few would find it a victory to be welcomed into such a grim place. Fewer than 100 people have sought long-term resettlement here over the past 10 years according to Albanian and United Nations officials.

"Albania is a transit country," says UN refugee representative Hossein Kheradmand. "People don't come here for asylum because of the economic situation. They come from the east and try to cross Albania to get into Western Europe." The per capita annual income here is little more than $2,000 (U.S.)

So what do the Uighurs themselves think of the international squabble over their fate?

Nobody knows outside the refugee processing centre where they're being kept because Albanian officials have made it nearly impossible to interview them, even when arrangements are made in advance with their attorney.

Ali Rasha, the camp director refused to allow this journalist into the camp, insisting, "I don't have the authority." That claim was flatly rejected by Totozani, who says the director decides who comes and goes.

Rasha apparently had the authority to allow in a Chinese man, who freely walked out of the camp. He said he wasn't from the Chinese Embassy, insisting he was "a businessman" before marching off in a huff.

Bruce Konviser is a freelance reporter based in Prague.

Source: Toronto Star (Canada), Jun 13, 2006